Blog: Pete Loshin

It's just a commercial, for eggs, but OMG!

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:00:00 -0700

I love you egg. If you're at work, turn your speakers down (unless you want your co-workers to think you're insane). And if you want the Korean version, try I love you egg, in Korean (click the first balloon under the blue cloud in the upper right corner to start the animation).

The animation for the two versions is similar but different.

Are you still with me? Good.

Because that's not a production of the Korean Egg Council--it's iloveegg! There's licensed characters and a comic book; both based (apparently) on a clay-animation cartoon produced in Korea.

So, the whole thing is designed to appeal to young minds (or immature minds, like mine) and get them to pester their parents to spend money. Presumably, there are licensed character toys, just like Pokemon and all the rest of those "collectible" series. I'm surprised it never made it to the US (or if it, I'm even more surprised I missed it).

Has anyone else seen these things?

Data Loss Database

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0700

I try to keep posted on important incidents of data loss (see More data blunders for example), but it's a big job.

That's why it's great news to hear about this: Open Security Foundation To Maintain Attrition.org's Data Loss Database - Open Source. Here's a link to the DataLossDB site, where you can track the latest database disasters. You can even download the database to do your own research or produce your own reports.

This is a big deal. There needs to be an authoritative place you can go to keep track of data loss incidents, and so far this looks good. Do you know of any others? Let me know--I want to hear about them!

Microsoft continues to get pummeled

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0700

Again, more bad news for Microsoft. With Apple's market share continuing to explode (Mac OS X approaches 8 percent market share in June), and Linux notching some respectable increases (er, sort of: Linux - Still chasing that elusive 1% market share) , the people at Redmond have to be worried, despite all the "success" they're having with Vista.

Here's the latest round of pain and humiliation:

Network World's Stiennon on Security offers Top Ten Worst Uses for Windows, and Ten More Stupid Uses for Windows. Some are silly, like the first, "To display a static green arrow over the open TSA security lanes at Detroit Metro.", except when displaying BSODs. But more are frightening, like using Windows for things like running trains, air traffic control systems, medical systems and other seriously mission-critical applications.

Is Vista really all that? Apparently, there's still plenty of demand for XP: Windows XP a hot item on Amazon.

Leave it to Wikipedia to publish these lists: Features new to Windows Vista and Features removed from Windows Vista. Number one on the "removed" list? Active Desktop, which back about ten years ago was a really cool feature (kind of like desktop widgets, where you can map live web content onto your desktop). There's lots more, which is scary: what happens in ten years if Microsoft decides to remove support for your mission-critical application from the latest version of Windows?

This guy is a real hero: How I got a Windows Vista refund from HP. After many hours on the phone with HP support, and lots more time spent documenting the process over months, he tells the story of how he got a refund after deciding the Windows Vista license was too abusive to agree to. I felt the same way when I bought my current PC, but didn't have the patience or perseverance to pursue it (and my recollection was that my license explicitly stated that there would be no refunds from the manufacturer).

Finally, here's indication that Linux can get some real traction out of the appliance computing market: Linux for housewives. XP for geeks. ZD Net blogger Robin Harris points out that Linux has advantages for the appliance market: it lowers the software cost, but it gives manufacturers more freedom over what software capabilities to build into their products.

What does the future hold? Stay tuned...

I am not making this up...

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:00:00 -0700

Here's a link to a real article in a real newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer

It's a follow-up to a story, Vista at one year: Progress and pain, that ran back in January and started off telling the story of Charles Walling, a man who just wanted his printer to work with Vista--after all, it worked with Windows XP.

Six months later, and Mr. Walling is a happier man, after:

Tom White, test manager for documents and printing in Microsoft's Windows Experience group, visited the Walling household on multiple occasions, figured out what was wrong, and ultimately got the printer to work.

Turns out, if you're configuring the printer for Vista but using the original printer driver CD provided by the vendor for Windows XP, you could have problems because Vista has problems keeping it all straight. Somehow. Sort of.

Read the whole article for excuses and spin from Microsoftniks.

Random list of lists

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:00:00 -0700

I love lists, and I kind of enjoy making my own lists. This one is a sort of paradox: how do you make a list of things with not so much in common (aside from the fact that I think they're all interesting or amusing or just plain worth looking at)? Once you do, they share the attribute of being members of the list. Oh well, enjoy--it's Friday!

5 Tools Everyone Working Online Should Have (IMHO)

The only 7 investments you need

10 Essential Sites for Tips and How-To’s

15 Reasons Mister Rogers Was the Best Neighbor Ever

25 Reasons to Convert to Linux. Actually, there are 26 reasons to convert--and 2 reasons to switch to Windows FROM Linux!

The 30 skills every IT person should have

50 Cool Things You Can Do with Google Charts API

Believe it or not, 80 How-To Sites Worth Bookmarking has a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio. Or it may just be the fact that most of these sites are places I already have bookmarked myself. Good job!

LinkedIn architecture, and more

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0700

Here's another link to an overview of a successful and big-data outfit: LinkedIn Architecture. It's from Cookies are for Closers: Oren Hurvitz’s Blog, which has more good stuff in it that you might like.

More data blunders

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0700

Here's more reports about data/base security follies:

Bank of NY Loses Tapes With 4.5 Million Clients' Data

From the UK: Intelligence official suspended over al-Qaeda file left on train

Data Breach Study Spanning 500 Break-Ins Released. Some interesting results, such as "Nearly nine in 10 corporate data breaches could have been prevented had reasonable security measures been in place"

Here's another UK story about surveillance cameras, This surveillance onslaught is draconian and creepy. The CCTV craze seems to have really gotten out of hand over there, but I suspect we'll be catching up here in the US soon enough. What are they used for in the UK? From the article: "the civilian in charge of a Worcester [UK] police station's surveillance team was suspended after detectives found, among one day's footage, a 20-minute sequence of close-ups of a woman's cleavage and backside as she walked oblivious through the streets." That's just the tip of a sickening iceberg of misuse of the technology, so read the article if you dare.

More Data Visualizations

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 06:00:00 -0700

As we get access to more and more data, we need more, and more interesting, ways of looking at it--and I keep tripping over some of these interesting visualizations. Sometimes they're even worth using!

One of the nice things about online bookstores like Amazon is that you can find just exactly what you want, instantly. Of course, that eliminates part of the charm of going into a bricks-and-mortar shop and discovering something you weren't expecting. So, consider Zoomii, which is a more real-world like bookstore experience. Working like the love-child of Amazon and Google Maps, you browse books visually, zooming in on "shelves" and looking at book covers. As a front-end, you can buy the books you find on Amazon; Zoomii makes their money through the Amazon Associates program.

Want to explore the Linux kernel? Try the Interactive Linux Kernel Map. It's a lot like the Zoomii (or Google Maps, for that matter): scroll-wheel to zoom in and out, click and drag to move around, and click to open up source code. Not as slick, perhaps, as other visualizations, but certainly useful if you're interested in understanding how the Linux kernel works.

It's one thing to remap huge databases into user-friendly interfaces; it's another to demonstrate relationships among different entities. That's what these Maps of science show: how different scientific fields are related to each other.

Not exactly data visualization, but it's a neat application, Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), from Microsoft Research, is a friendlier and possibly easier alternative to CAPTCHA for sorting out bots from humans. The idea is to require completion of a task that's pretty easy for humans, but almost impossible for computers: differentiate between photos of cats and dogs. I played with it for a while, and it seems as if you don't have to get all the cats perfectly, but as long as you only miss one (I think) and don't misidentify any dogs as cats, you can pass for human.

SmugMug: Amazon Web Services Success Story

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:00:00 -0700

Wondering whether Amazon Web Services could be used to build a profitable business? Flickr-killer wannabe SmugMug has built a scalable--and profitable--web service using AWS products EC2 and S3.

SmugMug founder and CEO Don MacAskill tells you all about how they do it on his blog, here: SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug).

In Defense of Vista

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0700

I'm not sure if this article at Gizmodo is entirely sincere, but it's certainly worth reading if you've got any opinions at all about Vista: Ten Reasons Why Vista Isn't That Bad.

Some of the reasons sound pretty pathetic:

"3. Games work just about as well as under XP." (only a 10% degradation in performance!)
"8. Drivers support isn't as bad as it's made out to be."
"9. It's not any buggier than Windows XP. "

But read the article for the rest of the reasons, the succinct and pungent comments, as well as the link (the first one in the article) to the Youtube video of "lightning bolt, lightning bolt" nerds. Swallow your coffee before you open that one, unless your monitor needs cleaning anyway.

The dark side of OpenID

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:00:00 -0700

Are you still keeping an eye on OpenID? (for an introduction, see OpenID: Another Approach to Identities, or OpenID Taking Over the Internet or Yet More on OpenID)

If you want all the "dirt" on the protocol, check out The problem(s) with OpenID. It's all there: the potential for problems with security, privacy, trust, and so on. Just don't worry too much about uptake, as that's already in full swing.

Form Follows Function

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:00:00 -0700

If you're an operating system zealot--whether you love Linux or militate for Microsoft--you should read this excellent article: A Tale of Four Kernels. You can get the publication details there, the short story is it's published by the ACM, and it's for real.

What's the bottom line? After examining source code of four leading kernels: FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel (WRK), it turns out that:

The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

In other words, the development process chosen is no assurance of software quality. Closed source or open source, it's all good (or not).

Microsoft Follies, again

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:00:00 -0700

If you're looking for trouble in Redmond, here are a couple more news items to fuel your schadenfreude:

Closing the Door to Microsoft Vista is a Business Week piece on the problem facing many big business who don't see much point in upgrading to Vista from XP--and who are planning to wait until Microsoft releases Windows 7 (Vista's soon-to-be long-awaited successor). With that worthy package "due in 2010 or 2011", enterprises that choose to sit out Vista just have to wait another four or five years to upgrade. (And yes, I know the math is off.)

It's not just corporate buyers who are thinking twice (or more) about Vista. Here's a PC World Business Center report that explains the reasons Coders Tell Why They're Avoiding Vista. Apparently, the new features in Vista really aren't compelling to software consumers, and with so many users hesitating over the upgrade, there's not much point to building Vista-only apps (see above).

Here's a nice little summary about Microsoft's responses to the Vista blahs, from ArsTechnica: Microsoft: "There is no need to wait for Windows 7". From the article: "Microsoft's argument focuses on the fact that Windows 7 will be much closer to Vista than Vista is to XP, and therefore it makes sense for businesses to ease up the transition process for themselves by moving to Vista first." What? Go through the trouble of a dubious, disruptive and expensive upgrade now, so you can repeat the process in just a couple of years? And those total cost of ownership numbers seem kind of iffy to me, too, especially since they don't seem to include the cost of the upgrade itself.

Have you spotted a Microsoft Folly lately? Let me know about it!

Microsoft Open Source not so open?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:00:00 -0700

One of Microsoft's tried and true competitive strategies is to "extend and embrace" the competition. With open source, this has taken the form of creating Shared Source Licenses. Two of them, the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) have even been approved as OSI compliant by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

In theory, software released under either of those licenses is as "free" (in the open source sense) as Linux, Firefox, or any other open source software. Meaning that you could look over the source code any time you liked, for example.

That's the theory.

In practice, apparently, it's not so clear, at least in the case of the Sandcastle project. Sandcastle is a documentation compiler for Managed Class Libraries, hosted at Microsoft's open source project hosting web site, CodePlex. You might wonder, What are the requirements for hosting a project on CodePlex? #1: choose a license (per the FAQ link, the implication is you need to choose an open source license), and #3: there must be source code.

Sandcastle, ostensibly released under the Ms-PL, doesn't come with source. Yet. The story came to my attention via Reddit, here. The big questions seem to be whether an OSI-approved license can be used to release software without source code--because the Ms-PL seems to somehow not refer to source code, while still supposedly being an open source license!

Stay tuned for more about this; there will probably be more links to meta-websites where open source issues are discussed, as well as responses from various other sources. I'll have more to say/write about this--let me know what you think!

New category: Microsoft Follies

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:00:00 -0700

I'm a Microsoft-watcher, and by "Microsoft-watcher" I mean I like to watch for unflattering news and other stories about Microsoft. This year it's been like shooting fish in a barrel; my favorites are those headlines that just stand on their own--the links I don't have to follow to get the gist of the stories.

Like these:

Windows is 'collapsing,' Gartner analysts warn. From Computerworld's coverage of a Gartner-sponsored conference this April. From the article: "...analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts." Tsk, tsk.

Here's a review of Vista, from Infoworld: Fat, fatter, fattest: Microsoft's kings of bloat. The article sub-title gives the bad news: "Our tests show that Windows Vista and Office 2007 not only smash Redmond's previous records for weight gain, but given the same hardware diet, run at less than half the speed of generation XP". Ouch.

With the big splash the Asus Eee PC made in its Linux versions, it should surprise no one that Microsoft is putting pressure on hardware manufacturers to combat Linux with big discounts on Microsoft products (rather than, say, making a better product). From PC World: Microsoft to Limit Capabilities of Cheap Laptops. Play nice with Microsoft for up to a $10 discount on the Windows license, per machine (current prices: "...US$26 for Windows XP Home Edition for ULPCs sold in emerging markets such as China and India, and $32 for those sold in developed markets..."). With hardware makers' already razor-thin profit margins, $10 per machine is a big deal. No wonder Asus went along with it.

Stay tuned for more, as they come in. And they will keep coming, I'm sure!

Oh, and let me know if you see any good ones that I've missed.